Petah Coyne: How Much a Heart Can Hold
Last Four weeks to Experience this Wonderland of Physical Forms at the Lowe Art Museum at University of Miami. On view until March 14.
The Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami proudly presents Petah Coyne: How Much A Heart Can Hold, featuring more than a dozen expansive mixed-media sculptures spanning decades of work by one of America’s most celebrated contemporary sculptors.
Pulsing at the heart of this museum show is Coyne’s fascination with female identity, and her deep reverence for under-recognized women writers and historical figures, including Zelda Fitzgerald, Joan Didion, Zora Neale Hurston, Jane Austen, and more.
The exhibition focuses on the ways her artistic process is inspired by women’s creativity — especially her use of seductive materials to create towering sculptures that bring the viewer in, while confronting the barriers women face.
These extraordinary landscapes of physical forms are on view through March 14. The sprawling installations and tactile meditations honor the creative power of women through artistic transformation. Several works are on tour for the first time, and some have never been shown in museums.
She is best known for the elaborate physicalities of her large-scale hanging sculptures and monumental floor installations, laborious and time-intensive to create.
“I think the only way for an artist to know or understand anything is to make work almost from a blind spot, and what you produce speaks to you. Before I begin a sculpture I never know where I am going to go.”
“I think women in particular are given this intuitive instinct. We have this power and we must learn to trust it,” says Petah Coyne.
“I am thrilled that this exhibition is traveling to university museums. University students are so open, and they are thinking constantly,” adds Coyne.
“Petah Coyne reminds what it is to be human — heart, body, mind, and soul,” says Dr. Jill Deupi, the Lowe Art Museum’s Beaux Arts Executive Director and Chief Curator.
“This remarkable exhibition invites us into a wonderland of physical forms whose manifold sources of inspiration are as broad as they are compelling. The viewer leaves the show feeling not only newly inspired, but also newly alive through her work,” adds Dr. Deupi.
A quote by Zelda Fitzgerald inspired the exhibition title: “Nobody has ever measured, even the poets, how much a heart can hold,” said the American writer, dancer and painter.
Fittingly, Coyne’s monumental sculpture Zelda is named in Fitzgerald’s honor and anchors the exhibition.
Constructed from an astonishing range of materials, the seven-foot-tall work explores Fitzgerald’s legacy, capturing both her brilliance and the professional constraints and obstacles she endured.
Zelda ignites the tactile senses, yet a transparent glass box stands between the viewer and the monochromatic work, representing a cage that is a metaphor for Zelda Fitzgerald’s life.
Her accomplishments were thwarted by the oppressive time in which she lived, and overshadowed by her marriage to F. Scott Fitzgerald (many lines from her letters appear in her husband’s writings).
Literature, film, art history, and the depths of an individual’s soul are all springboards for Coyne’s incessant and unrelenting imagination. Because she has dyslexia, the stories in the books that inspire her are often processed differently by Coyne.
She attributes the resulting artworks that hang from the ceiling (instead of standing from the floor) as a product of her dyslexia. In Coyne’s hands, materials, like our lived experiences, are endlessly re-purposed and reborn into something new.
A lover of objects, she gathers her unorthodox materials from everywhere and wrestles with them until they come together perfectly, pushing them as far as she can.
She has received critical acclaim for using intricate, unconventional materials — trees, human hair, dead fish, mud, shackles, scrap metal, wax, silk flowers, black sand, hospital bandages, chandeliers, taxidermy, and more — to create sculptures that are both precise in their attention to detail and baroque in their emotional range.
One of the large-scale sculptures in this exhibition is made of a 1950s Airstream trailer that was totaled in an accident and shredded into thin stainless-steel wire that looks like hair, from a facility that shreds and recycles metals from cars, trains, and trucks.
“I spoke to this object and told this Airstream trailer that even though it had been totaled, I would give it new life by sending it to museums for people to enjoy, allowing it to live forever,” says Coyne.
The New York-based artist has been chosen for more than 45 solo museum shows throughout her career. In 2024, Coyne received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center.
Her national honors include awards from the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, three awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, two International Association of Art Critics Awards, and more.
Her work is held in the permanent collections of several leading institutions, including: the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum of American Art, and many others.
Read more about the artist at www.petahcoyne.org.
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